GJC: Giuseppe Ficarra "Eccentric binary black holes with numerical relativity"

Tuesday 8 Apr 2025, 12:30 → 14:00 Europe/Rome

Marconi Sala Lauree

We perform a systematic study of eccentric orbiting nonspinning black hole binaries. We start from a technical study of the numerical techniques, where we select grid structure and global resolution that optimize accuracy and speed of current computational resources, while choosing different gauge parameters and Courant factors. With these choices we perform a study of the merger times as a function of eccentricity, for configurations with comparable orbital energy content and find that its dependence is well represented by the post-Newtonian formula given by Peters, when merger times are normalized to their quasicircular values. We then perform a systematic coverage of five small-medium eccentricities up to e~0.45 and six mass ratios up to 8.5:1, producing a total of 30 simulations covering up to 25 orbits to merger to further model the unequal mass ratio dependence of merger times and as a seed study to a forthcoming new systematic catalog of gravitational waveforms from eccentric binary black holes. Finally, we will also show application of such simulations to perform direct parameter estimations of gravitational waves events, such as for instance GW200208.